Torn
by Mariagoner
Summary: Amy Laurence is dead, Theodore Laurence is a widower, and Jo March is already facing a very cruel end. Life, such as it is, falls within. AU to the Braver Than We Are series. R-rated version, NC-17 rated original.


This one-shot probably won't make much sense if you haven't read Elizbeth Harker's excellent supernatural Little Women fic Braver Than We Are... but it _does_ nonetheless contain Jo, Laurie, the threat of death, a very cruel mark upon one or the both of them... and a hell of a lot of sex.

In any case, I do hope you enjoy ('enjoy'?) this small glimpse of what could have been. It was a very, very intense writing experience and I don't imagine I could ever duplicate it... but holy hell was it fun nonetheless!

**Title: Torn  
Fandom: Little Women  
Series: An AU fic for Elizabeth Harker's Braver Than We Are series.  
Characters/Pairings: Jo/Laurie, Laurie/Amy  
Rating: This version is rated R and has the more graphic scenes/paragraphs cut out of it. There is a NC-17 version floating around. Please review and let me know you want it if you'd like to read that version instead.  
Summary: Amy Laurence is dead, Theodore Laurence is a widower, and Jo March is already facing a very cruel end. Life, such as it is, falls within.**

* * *

**Note:** This story contains massive, massive spoilers for **Braver Than We Are**. Essentially, it follows up on the story but posits a few massive twists to it. (Mainly because it was written long before Elizabeth put the full sequence of her story together.) In this AU, Jo and Laurie realize that Jo herself has been infected by a vampire's bite shortly after Amy dies from one herself... and end up having to confront the issue shortly after their nerves are rubbed raw from Amy's horrible death. Laurie is hysterical over losing yet another woman he loves, Jo is already breaking down under the stress of losing her senses the way Amy did... and somewhere between the two of them, the inevitable happens.

* * *

Even now, she can't believe that this is what being loved is meant to be like: being torn up and being forced open.

Even in her position- her position, her position, her thrice damned current _position_- she can't quite believe what's happening, or even what has happened. She ought to believe- she _needs_ to believe- there's enough going on within her to make her believe, as one of his hands- _his_ hands- grips her hair, and another presses itself to her, beneath her slip's edge, into a fist, almost pressing in, almost penetrating her-

She's grinding into his knuckles, tears in her eyes. Mindless, trying not to think. Trying not to grope for reasons.

Not of who she is, not of who _he_ is. Not even of what led to this.

"Jo," her brother-in-law whispers, into her ear, against the lobe his teeth had been tearing. His voice is throaty and ragged and seems on the verge of bleeding out, as his wife's throat had for hours before she had left them all. "Jo, Jo, Jo, _Jo_-"

As though he couldn't bear to think of anything else, as though the thought of the wife he had buried only a few days ago would also end him.

Was he as ashamed as she was, as needy, as desperate? Was he closing his eyes right not and pretending she was someone else?

She isn't Amy, couldn't be, not even in her dreams. Had never been so fine, so sweet, so pretty. Had always simply been herself, rough and ragged and unladylike and unseemly, so sure that he would learn to hate her soon that she had sent him flying into the arms of her far superior sister.

(Jo does not regret because there's nothing to regret. What's done is done already.)

(She can only be herself.)

Here and now, where she cannot run, Amy has no hold. Here and now, her thighs are matted with her own need, his sweat, her slick, his movements, and he is touching them freely. They were sticky before he had even touched her, when something had pressed itself sweetly against her throat and forced something foreign to her, penetrating far before her brother-in-law had ever dared dream. When she had woken up and seen her fading eyes in the mirror, and knew the earth would claim another March daughter before the year was done.

And Laurie- her _brother_- had kissed her as soon as she had told him as much. Close to her as any kin could be and yet, he had kissed her- as though he had wanted to erase her death sentence with a necklace of his own bites, his teeth shuddering against her skin like an animal, as though whatever restraints had once bound him had long been escaped from.

She wonders how often he's done this to her Amy. If he had been just as hard then, just as desperate, had wept into his wife's hair just as much.

(Amy's face, bloodless and blank. What she would, dull eyes staring, now think of them. )

"Don't stop," Jo chokes out urging her boy against her to do- do _something._ She doesn't know, she can't even imagine, she can only respond to the shuddering and jerking body, already breaking down, falling into decomposition

The boy who had loved her once, the man she had lost, the brother she had wanted again. He pushes her hair out of her neck and blindly nuzzles the marks that run jagged on her skin, as though even lunatic affection should shield her from what's to come.

"I'll never forgive you if you die," he had once said, as soon as he saw them.

"Teddy, please don't ask me," she had said once, his fingers stroking her hair.

This is not who they are, only just what they've become.

And Jo is so very, very desperate now, both with fear and with love.

Before she had been marked, like cattle being branded for the slaughter, she had never thought this could be a form of love. She had assumed either celibacy or husbandly care, had thought that if she were to ever be with a man, she would find convention and kindness, kisses in the sunlight, caresses in the dark, careful hands sweeping against her forehead and her features, love acceptably clandestine, serene, tender, soft, nothing to truly discomfort her senses.

Not this, not this form of ruthless brazenness, not her brother-in-law watching her strip sobbing in the light before night's darkness, exposing first her neck and then more, here and there, his hands sweeping across her face and her form, tightening around her neck, as though to uproot her to him through sheer violence, the fingers he sets against her shoulders like sharp vices.

He is the best of men and yet, like all men, his morals can very well break and bend.

(Jo wishes she hadn't seen what had been behind his eyes for a moment just then.)

(Not now, even with Amy gone.)

(Not in that way of his that could never be excused or accepted.)

"I'll never forgive you if you die," he had said, and she wonders if he will ever forgive her for her response: her teeth against his neck, and then against his cheek, his collar, his chin-

She will remember the second kiss they share all her life, for however long she might still exist. There's none of the gentleness in their first, and even more of the desperation, her body shoved against the nearest surface, his hand ripping one of her shift's straps to reach for her bare breast, his other arm tangled so tight in her hair that she wouldn't have been able to move even if she had _wanted_-

And God help her, she _hadn't._

Jo thinks _please, please, let this only be the mark_; thinks this even as he helps her tear his shirt from him, helps her hike up her own slip, helps her forget what was happening even as it happened with the rough brush of his calluses against her thighs and her nipples, against her aching stomach muscles, against the planes of inner thighs long gone damp from wanting him.

This time, she doesn't say: _Teddy, please don't ask me._

This time, she says only the first two words and lets him fill in the blanks.

There are tears in his eyes as he kisses hers, his tongue demanding and wet. She thinks she hears him say, "You should have let me do this a long time ago," but knows she must have misheard.

(With him, she's always gotten it wrong. Always, always has.)

"Teddy, please," she had said, again and again, over and over. Unstated was what came after that.

_Please make me feel alive. Please grant me one last wish before I die. Please let me know what it would have been like if only I had said yes and yes and yes..._

He grinds her ear-lobe between his teeth and one of his hands yanks her hair back as his other one wrests all notions of maidenhood from her shuddering body. His breath is hot on her, and his calluses tighten rhythmically on the stretch of skin that was once covered by her bloomers.

If she wants this to end respectably, while she can still blame the mark on her body, she has to end it now.

She had said once: _Teddy, please don't ask me._

She doesn't say it now.

His fingers are not gentle when they spread her open, his motions those of an animal in the midst of frenzy, tearing her open and forcing her up, until she stands nearly on her tip-toes, stretched out balls of her feet helping her rock. He tears into her, as though to uproot her from her own body, his fingers twisting and pounding and forcing themselves into coils of muscles she would never have discovered on her own. She's keening with it, with the pain and the need and the _pleasure_ of it, something more elemental than mere animal instinct making her move against him, her hips bucking up and down as he grinds himself against her with hot fury, she moving-

Moving like a wanton. Moving like a whore. Moving like someone who would betray her own friend.

Her eyes fill with tears as she looks at the ceilings, toward the room where Amy had once lived and laughed and languished and been loved, before it all cut short.

She should stop him; he should stop _her._ This should never have gone on for so long.

One of her rebellious hands travel below the raised edge of her slip, nails scoring the corded muscles of his arm at work. Her fingers find his, entwine even in the midst of her contracting inner skin, and still him for a moment, just a moment, just a half second.

He exhales hard against her ear and she has known him more than long enough to realize the sound of his horror.

"Oh God," he says, and he would have pulled his sticky, blind hand away from her had she not held on with wild nails. "Oh God, oh _God_, Jo, I'm so _sorry_, I don't- I don't know-"

"Don't be," she says, and she is weeping but with her eyes faced forward, so he cannot see her. She won't add to his burden, even if he's already added to hers.

"I-" He begins, and cannot seem to quite finish. She feels him exhale shakily behind her. "Oh God, I almost- Jo, I _almost_-"

"No!" she almost screams, and his fingers tighten involuntarily in her, until she wants to scream loud enough to let the whole world stop her. "No, Teddy, you didn't, you can't, you haven't! Not when you should know-"

Not when it should be so readily apparent how much more strongly she wanted this, his desires nothing next to hers.

Not when even the blindest among them could have realized that he'd made a lucky escape from a disastrous marriage to Jo March long before.

Not when they both knew that if he touched her now, it was only because he could not have the March girl he really wanted, the gay, golden-haired beauty he had fallen in love with, the one who he had lost and the one Jo knew he now imagined, still living, still loving, still in his arms and whole.

(Jo has never imagined what could have happened if only she had said yes before.)

(What's done is done and there's no use imagining themselves in another world.)

"I want more," she whispers, so she does not have to think; so that she can protect himself from her just a little longer and let him imagine herself another girl. "Please, Teddy, if ever you've cared for me..."

She can claim this much, at least. Not his love, not his desire, not his longing, not his need. But enough of him so he can help her forget, help her deny, help her believe just for once that right could come from wrong.

"I'm sorry," she says, knowing what she asks can't be anything but an affront. "God, Teddy, I'm so sorry."

He turns her roughly around and when his lips meet hers with a rough, raw jerk, she can taste his tears sliding agaisnt hers.

She's killing him; she _knows_ she's killing him. She's asking him for something that she has no right to be taking. She touches him, and he shudders as though he were standing in the chill outside; she holds him, and presses his face to her hair and sobs.

She knows she repulses him and a selfish, terrible part of her wishes at least that he would hide it, that he would pretend that he wanted her even a little. Just enough to hold on.

But he had had Amy as a wife, as a lover and a bride, and a man couldn't possibly go from wanting gold to dross.

(He had thought that she was his victim but he was wrong; it's the other way around.)

And when he presses her to the wall behind her and when he falls down on his knees, she closes her eyes and blindly waits for whatever's to come.

"Jo," he whispers hoarsely, his stubbled cheek scratching against her thigh's inner skin. "Oh God, Jo, I can't lose you, not _you_, not again, not after-"

"You won't," she promises, and this is their first real moment of tenderness since his eyes had swept across the sentence of her death. Their first real moment of tenderness, and she is already lying, spinning fairy tales of deliverance. "No matter what, I- _you_ won't. I'll always be your friend."

(No wonder they would have been disastrous together. She would have let the whole world burn down, if only it could have saved him.)

"You-" and he has to stop because he chokes on his words; she can see him even through close eye-lids. "You, _you_, God, Jo, you- you never even bothered to-"

And her eyes snap open when he presses his lips against the very heart of her, tongue sliding hot and wet.

And if she does not shout from what comes afterward, it is only because she has two hands to bite to keep her tongue silent, and not enough slick left in her throat to scream again.

"You've never, ever understood what I want, do you?" he asks, and then licks his way within.

* * *

_(scene cut)_

* * *

Not until she's sobbing and he's standing up, holding her up, holding her by the shoulders and almost gently pulling the strands of hair from her face and tears. Not until she cries his name brokenly and he strokes her cheek almost tenderly and she can look at him without wanting to die sans any sort of hesitation, knowing what they are, knowing that they can't be free.

(His wife, her sister, their _Amy._)

Through the haze of her tears, she can almost make out his face, his gaze, the turn of his eyes, what he looks like when he kisses her sweetly.

Jo tastes what has to be herself on his mouth and her gorge does not rise, not even a bit.

(She wishes it would, though, just a little. Just enough to let her remember who and what she is.)

"Do you love me?" he asks, and his voice cracks on the third word, and she doesn't understand why this is. Why he would say this, why he would ask, why he would look at her as though she were still in her own skin. He's always been an enigma and she's never understood, not him, not about him, not when it came to the complicated matters that always strove to separate them.

(This is what she thought she knew: that he's complicated, that he's beautiful, that his work makes him miserable. If she had the right, she would tell him: leave it all behind for your art, you've got too much a gift to squander it all on learning accounting tricks. Only there had been Amy to consider, Amy who would never marry a pauper, and they been so happy together and surely she had been wrong.)

(With him, she almost always has been.)

And suddenly she realizes that what he does now, he only does because he pretends that she's Amy. The golden girl he had truly loved, the one she had been replaced with.

It makes sense. Why, after all, would he look at her with so much love, so much pain, so much hurt, so much sorrow- why unless he thought one March girl as good as another, least for the aching present?

He has substituted them before although she knows that she was the infatuation and Amy the true love. Amy and not her, he choosing the one was beautiful and good and proper. Amy, with her fine mores and manners; Amy, who would never marry a pauper.

(Amy, who had been so good and kind and beautiful and sweet, who had not deserved to be thought of meanly, who had not deserved the death that had found her, had bled her out before she had reached five-and-twenty years.)

"Yes," she says at last, because she does, and because she owes him. Because she knows this is a brief spell of madness and he will never ask again, never once the grief had fled and he had no need of illusions, no more use for her tired, ugly body. "Yes, Yes, Te- Laurie, _yes_-"

And he kisses her, hikes up her shift to her waist and presses something hot and velvety and hard against the underside of her belly, until she reaches down wondering to touch it and feels it disappearing into his own body.

_Oh,_ she thinks, and somehow, after all this time, finally blushes. _So that's what grown men have on them once they stop being children._

"Say yes one more time," the man she almost married says, even begs. "Please, Jo- _please._ Just yes, just once, with me."

It's kind of him to remember, at least a little, precisely who she is. She's sore and everything below her belly-button hurts, every muscle in her body seeming to ache. Fatigue flows from his actions, from her responses, from their mutual bruises, from the mark on her neck that brands her for the grave. She wants to lie down; she wants to close her eyes. She wants to forget who she is and just why she should be ashamed.

"Yes," she says anyway, despite it all. Yes, because she owes him, because she loves him, because she can bear him wanting her to be someone else if she can just _have_ him, even for a little bit. Yes, because she loves him, and she's dying, and her sister is dead, and she knows she'll be the only one condemned. Yes, because she loves him, and she knows him, and she knows that this'll be all she'll ever have of him.

"Yes," she says again, because she is dying and she loves him, and he kisses her again until she opens like a flower, until she shifts and lets him take her weight fully onto his strong back and thighs and hips, and he makes a soft, desperate noise and finds his way within.

* * *

_(Scene cut)_

* * *

Again and again, he makes his way into her, an invasion that cracks both of their voices and makes their sounds crack and hiss, makes them curse as they try desperately to find some manner of words to speak to one another, apologizing, begging, questioning, threatening, a panoply of terrible things they could never have said out loud if Amy were not dead and Jo not dying, and all propriety lost to them.

"Jo," he whispered through cracked lips, "I should have waited. I shouldn't have-"

And she interrupts him before he can tell her he regrets this, nipping his mouth hard until he bled so prettily against her own lips.

"Teddy," she gasps, as he kisses her neck and spins stars into her swollen skin, "I'm sorry that I never told you before-"

And though she will likely never know why, he angles his hips and interrupts her with an advance within that takes away her breath again.

They've never been the sort to do things in the sensible way, not the two of them. They've never been able to be easy together. Never the two of them.

Impossibly, he finally presses his forehead to hers and laughs hoarsely and asks, "Do you ever think we'll be able to talk to each other properly?"

"Never!" she responds, laughing as well, tears in her eyes, and then he gives a funny little gasp. Eternity itself comes to a pause when at last presses himself full and flush to her, and places one of his fine, pianist hands to her breast, right where he's marked her as his for as long as she still exists.

"I love you," she says, one last time, and it seems to just enough to bring him to the brink.

* * *

_(Scene cut.)_

* * *

He's there for a minute, one long, glorious minute, throwing his ecstatic face back as though he were seeing some luminous vision in his mind, his whole self alive with the effort of it, with both agony and ecstasy within. She watches him with a raw, animal hunger that she can barely call her own, that's both within her and without, that nearly humiliating to call her own if she hadn't felt liberated to know that she could do this- that he might not love her but that she could do this, could touch him and bring him to this tottering ecstasy. And for far longer than this moment will last, she knows some part of her will not regret this, no matter what else might happen to her, no matter what reckoning she will eventually meet.

(She loves him. She'll never tell him again. It would be the worst betrayal of all.)

(She's not sure for who or what; she just knows it _is_.)

He's there for a minute, one long, glorious minute, and then he's in her arms again. And he kisses her and laughs and at her and shudders against her skin like a damp hound, like a man who loves her, helping her carefully down, not abandoning her quite quickly as she had feared.

It's enough to keep her clinging on, though she knows he's only being kind here.

"Thank you," he says, though she doesn't know for what, and she knows that she will love him until the day she dies, even if he never so much as touches her again.

And she's tired now, so, so very tired, both with the mark given to her by God-Alone-Only-Knew, and by him as well here. Tired enough to let him pick up her, whispering tender, half-heard words all the while, and tired enough even to make no protest when he takes her up the fine stairs to the bedrooms above, bypassing the ones he had shared with another, more suitable March daughter to a simpler one, furnished for either an intruder or guest.

She's both and neither, nothing and everything, as label-less as she always was.

With infinite gentleness, he sets her down upon the covers, and divests her of her torn and soiled shift with gentle hands that linger on her skin.

(He's always been so good, this boy of hers. Maybe that's why she loves him.)

He lingers, he kisses, he caresses, he nuzzles- does everything short of loving her again to make her heart swell until it felt too large to be contained in her breast, as though she were a broken cup that tried to hold the bounties of the sea.

(It's only what's in her unstable heart and still, her cup over-floweth.)

He looks at her and looks at her, and she can read him even in the coming darkness. After all, she's seen this look of his in dreams a hundred times over, dreams in which she had said something else other than her words, dreams in which all the world had bowed their heads to them.

_Don't say it_, she begs him, though he cannot hear her. _Please don't say it. I don't know if I'll again have the strength-_

"Stay with me," he says, defying her, because he wouldn't be her Teddy if he didn't. "Whatever's happening, whatever's already _happened_- I want you with me. I want to be with you. I won't abandon you to chance."

"Teddy, please don't ask me," she had said once, a very long time ago. Said it and though she had regretted it, it had worked out for the best. He had found Amy and she had made him so much more happy than Jo could ever even imagine. They have been golden together, young and beautiful and poised and responsible, the lord and lady of the manor who would take care of the rest of their kin.

Only Amy is gone now and Jo is all that's left. And she knows she's not enough, knows that she's no lady, knows that with her there is no nobility left in Laurie, his wife's death having stripped it of him. With her, Laurie's less a lord than an elemental fire that might well rage and consume everything in its path.

(She cannot tame him and even if she had wanted to, she honestly wouldn't have.)

And even if she had been, despite the hope in her eyes, she knows she will be as one dead.

"Teddy, please don't ask me," she had said once, a very long time ago.

She knows she ought to say it again.

Only it's hard to, when he's still lingering over her, his touch now flowing over her like healing waters, his mouth roaming over her lips and eyelids and nipples and hips, gently nuzzling every bruise and every break he's given her and she's taken for herself, greedily storing him in. It's hard to when he touches her like a masterpiece, like a relic, like she might be even more precious to him than she can imagine. And it somehow seems so easy to have him do so, so easy and so gentle, that she barely even starts when she feels his now fully bare body on hers again, apparently sliding between the sheets that cover her, her bare skin cradled against his.

Somewhere along the line, in between all those sweet pushes and presses, he had somehow found room to undress. And though Jo knows she should- should say something, should push him away, should tell him that she hadn't meant what she just said about love (although she does, God help her, she _does_), she's tired to death.

She just wants to fall asleep in his arms, and let the morning find them both with whatever else it has.

"Ask me tomorrow," she finally says, and it's neither hopeful nor hopeless, neither happy nor sad. There's too much they don't know and haven't discussed for finality such as that. "Ask me tomorrow and... and maybe then..."

Laurie silences her with a finger splayed against love-stung lips, with a tremble to his mouth that she had thought never to see again. "Tomorrow," he repeats, his lips curving up. "For tonight, let's have this. And then, for tomorrow..."

Love buries itself in her up to the hilt and she slowly nods her assent.

And when he kisses her in the warmth of her room, finally in her arms, she closes her eyes and touches her hands to his and finally, gently, lets him lull her to sleep, to oblivion, tenderness, and rest.

She should have said: _I don't think you love me anymore._

But she's been wrong about him so many times before.

(He had asked her: _You've never, ever understood what I want, do you?_)

(The answer, as always, is a very firm no.)

(But maybe someday it'll be a yes.)

* * *

**Author's Note**: Elizabeth, thank you for the awesome series and I can't wait to see the wrap-up to it!

And everyone else... thank you for reading! Please remember that if you'd like to read the uncut, NC-17 rated version of this, you need to leave me a review with your email address and I'll send it over to you.

Of course, normal reviews are also always appreciated. ;)


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